Nigerian immigrant and graduate student blinded by attack

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NEWARK — Okechukwo Anyanwu punched in the familiar numbers on his cell phone as he stepped onto Lehigh Avenue in Newark, outside Beth Israel Medical Center. When his wife answered, he told her he would be home early.

"Because of the snow," he told her. "They’re letting us go now."

His wife, Onyekachi, began to say how happy she was, but her words were cut off by an odd sound, her husband’s strangled cry of "Oh, Jesus!" The phone went silent.

At that instant, Anyanwu was plunged into a painful and disorienting blackness. He reached his hand up to the left side of his face. He felt blood.

"Help me!" he cried out, struggling to stay on his feet, staggering away to escape another blow, afraid he might be hit by a car, terrified by his sudden blindness.

The vision in his right eye was destroyed by glaucoma a decade ago. Vision in his left had at that instant been stolen by a stranger who struck Anyanwu for no apparent reason and left the Rutgers graduate student without sight and, perhaps, without a future.

A nurse led him back into the hospital where Anyanwu served for nearly a year as a social work intern. This time, he went to the emergency room. His assailant fled.

His wife, frantic because Anyanwu did not answer his cell after his scream, called the hospital. She says a woman answering the main number wondered if she were calling about the man whose attack was captured by the hospital’s security cameras. Onyekachi Anyanwu finally got through to her husband in the emergency room.

"I could not know what happened, I was so frightened," she says. Like her husband, she is a Nigerian immigrant and American citizen. She also is a social worker, what Anyanwu, an honors graduate of Essex County College and Rutgers, hoped to be.

Now, they are unsure what will happen. Anyanwu, 44, is trying to keep up with assignments at the Graduate School of Social Work. Classmates visit at the Newark home he and his wife share with three young children. They read texts and lecture notes to him.

"I will try to finish, but I don’t know if I can,’’ he says. Anyanwu was scheduled to earn his master’s degree in May, but the events of Feb. 5 cast doubt on that goal.

The vision in his now damaged left eye has not been good since both eyes were struck by glaucoma years ago. Still, he could read with the help of thick glasses.

"Now everything is just a blur," he says. He had surgery a week after the attack. He needs another operation because his damaged eyelid cannot open, blocking what little he can see from that eye.

He and his family are fearful and angry. He regularly walked to the hospital from his home.

"I was never afraid of Newark," he says. "I am now."

His youngest child, a daughter, 5, would not come near him for days. She was frightened by the disfigurement of her father’s familiar face. Two older sons are angry.

"They want to do something, but don’t know what," says their mother.

They also say they are troubled by the reaction of the hospital where he worked for months and of the Newark police. Hospital employees deny the attack was captured on camera. While police officers interviewed him in the emergency room, Anyanwu says detectives told him they will not come to his home to follow up.

When hospital officials were asked for comment, Caren Malone, a spokeswoman for Beth Israel, offered a statement noting the "incident did not take place on the property of Newark Beth Israel Medical Center and no attack was recorded by the hospital’s security cameras. Because the incident is under investigation by the Newark police, the hospital cannot comment further.’’

Newark police did not respond to questions.

"We got the police report and it says I was attacked by a black male," says Anyanwu. "But I never saw who hit me so I could have not have told them that."

Anyanwu says he forgives his attacker "because I am a Catholic." He hopes some day to meet the man who changed his life early on a February afternoon.

Hopes to meet him — and to help him if he can.

"He needs help, and I would be willing to provide guidance if I can," says the man who still hopes to be a social worker.

http://blog.nj.com/njv_bob_braun/2010/03/g...left_blind.html

[raymaga 26]

He truly found his calling in social work to be able to forgive and want to help his attacker that way!!!

Bless him!!

[w¡n9Nµ7 §£@¥€r 123]

He truly found his calling in social work to be able to forgive and want to help his attacker that way!!!

Bless him!!